By Danny Shaw
Earlier this month, on the morning of May 16, riot police brutally ripped professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard from her tent as she slept on campus at the University of California Irvine.
A disproportionate amount of police with helmets, clubs and guns violently burst into the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, doing what has been done across the United States to hundreds of encampments.
Officers carted away Willoughby-Herard, a global studies professor, in handcuffs, as well as other student and faculty protestors. They also destroyed the peaceful occupation. As police ushered her away, the media swarmed her, asking why she had engaged in this act of civil disobedience.
Her voice and answer reached millions: "Because we cannot have a genocidal foreign policy in a democracy. What job do I have if the students don't have a future?"
Millions of us who make up the Global Palestinian Family wondered: could professor Willoughby-Herard's voice do what none of our voices has been able to do? Reach Americans who are trapped in the echo chambers of CNN and Fox News and in complete denial about a colonial holocaust of human life funded with our taxpayer money?
Complicit US media
NY11, ABC, CNN, Fox, the Atlantic and other mainstream outlets have interviewed scores of leaders from the Palestine solidarity movement, including myself. Few if any of my or our words have ever aired because most American media refuses to show what is really happening on the ground in Gaza.
We say, "we stand against the delivery of thousands of German and US bombs Israel is dropping on a dehydrated and starved population." The mainstream media reports: "protestors are anti-Semitic."
Just in the first few weeks following October 7, Israel dropped the equivalent of two Hiroshima nuclear bombs on Gaza. In a recently released report, anti-war leaders Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies document just how many thousands of bombs are dropped on Gazans every day.
Despite the severe repression of information in the US, the Palestine solidarity movement works to document the human cost of the war on Gaza. According to the report, "As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel's 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria."
Some 230 days into the war, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the full gamut of Western media outlets continue to insist that this is "an Israel-Hamas war." The genocidal war would not be possible without the intentional control of information and brainwashing of Western populations that Hamas is vastly more powerful than it actually is.
Police sweeps
For people speaking up against the war, the fear of state attacks is constant. Most nights, at our encampments at Columbia University and City College in New York last month, a New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopter hovered above us, low enough to make sure no one slept.
A drone moved 10 feet every five seconds above hundreds of camped-out students who cried out for warmth and a Palestine free of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. There were even threats that college administrations loyal to the agenda of the US and Israel would call in the National Guard.
The heavy specter of the Kent State, Jackson State and Orangeburg student massacres more than 50 years ago also towered over every participant.
Amid the swirl of rumours, there was the temptation to run around in confusion, like chickens with our heads cut off. But the Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish student leadership's calm confidence checkmated those fears. This is the kind of unity Zionism is most afraid of.
Anything to distract from Gaza
Protesting peacefully is not easy anymore.
At no point did the Zionists give our students' encampments a respite. They circled the periphery, snapping pictures of students praying during Maghrib time at 7:58pm. They yelled obscenities during Isha prayer at 9:23pm.
They forced their way in to make the same points their kindergarten teachers and college instructors had indoctrinated into them for three generations. But the Palestinian people have no interest in the coloniser and his narratives.
Seventy-six years of being told you are an inferior non-people went up in smoke on October 7. The children of colonial humiliation had broken out of the concentration camp.
If you were not invited to a massive festival of peace, would you still insist on going? Would you barge into another's family's traditions?
The provocateurs are never far behind. They burst uninvited into the community. They do everything to shift the focus away from the war and to make it about themselves. The entire encampment follows their training. "Do not engage with Zionists."
If they persist, the students form phalanxes of freedom and sing civil rights songs until the Zionists get bored and seek out how to try to bully and humiliate next.
In the sea of keffiyehs, hundreds of "journalists" came and went, hunting for anything that could be twisted into an anti-semitic trope. Undercover informants and provocateurs infiltrated the outside rally engaging in an anti-Semitic skit in front of the drooling cameras.
In a scene totally alien to the essence of the Palestinian movement, two pretend students demanded money from a "Jewish student" in return for not further destroying a tattered, burnt Israeli flag. It was a disgusting scene meant to further demonise the burgeoning mass movement. Entitled Zionists insisted on making it all about them and their colonial narcissism.
Anything to distract from Gaza. The historic Jewish soul remains trapped between two holocausts
At UCLA, Zionist mobs beat peaceful protestors with metal poles and bats and attacked them with pepper spray and other weapons. The police watched before attacking the encampment themselves.
The Zionist fashions himself superior to his neighbours. The camp insisted on not relinquishing control of the narrative to the genocidaires. Not engaging with Zionist provocateurs remains rule #1.
Lessons learned
After a long day of civil disobedience training and anti-colonial educationals at the Columbia encampment, I jotted down the following notes:
There has not been one drop of alcohol. There has been no scent of weed. There has not been one incident of public urination. There is maximum discipline and focus on Gaza, and the non-negotiable push for Columbia's divestment from Israel's apartheid regime. The students stand by their demands, which the Western media empire attempts to frame as juvenile, naïve and hate-filled.
What an honour to be a witness to the unwavering assertiveness and the most seasoned camaraderie among these students. These demands are rooted in the highest truth: all human beings have a right to life, dignity and self-determination. Palestine is our moral compass.
Standing before the SWAT teams, a sophomore majoring in English thought of calling her parents on Long Island to tell them she loved them. But that thought quickly moved to the outer recesses of her mind.
Despite all the arrests, or maybe in part because of them, the tide is shifting as Zionism further isolates itself from humanity every day.
This was an inside moment among comrades who no one in the outside world could ever quite understand. Camaraderie was the watchword. A generation removed from the protagonists, I looked around at the beautiful leaders. Their passion compelled them forward. Who would one day write memoirs and make documentaries about this moment?
The roar of the helicopter and the silence of the drone above mocked us and our principles. The riot police, phalanxes of armed men and women, awaited orders to crack "the geeks' " heads open.
The NYPD formed a blue wall of repression armed with ignorance, self-interest and guns. All of mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams' diversity trainings boiled down to plain fascism.
Despite all the arrests, or maybe in part because of them, the tide is shifting as Zionism further isolates itself from humanity every day.
For the first time in its history, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and other leading officials responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Students are tearing up their degrees. High-level officials in US President Joe Biden's administration are resigning, including Lily Greenberg Call, the first Jewish appointee to protest and resign because of the war.
Universities under pressure from donors and the government are firing professors who speak up. Millions of us are making sacrifices to stop a colonial genocide of an indigenous people that has been in motion for 76 years.
To the anti-colonial fighters who are the age of our children across the world: Keep going! Keep fighting! It is your right to rebel! Seize the time! Keep leading the way! Gaza sees you!
"Palestine is our moral compass!"
About the author: Danny Shaw graduated from Columbia University with a BA in Sociology and Latin American Studies in 2000. He graduated with a Masters of International Affairs with a specialization in South American and Caribbean Studies in 2006 from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. After 18 years of teaching in the Latin American and Latinx Studies Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he was fired for his social media posts and for helping organize protests against the Israeli-US genocide in Gaza. He was camped out with the hundreds of students, faculty, alumni and staff that made up the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT Afrika.
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